The latest dispatch from the crumbling petro-state of Venezuela brings a tableau that would make Juvenal weep: makeshift hospitals sprouting on the manicured greens of Caracas country clubs. Here, where once the elite sipped whiskey and plotted golf handicaps, surgeons now amputate gangrenous limbs with pocket knives. The symbolism is so thick you could choke on it.
This is what happens when a society forgets the difference between wealth and civilisation. The Victorians understood that empire required sewers, schools, and a modicum of public health. Venezuela’s ruling class, by contrast, treated the nation as a personal piggy bank—until the piggy bank ran out of currency, medicine, and hope.
Now, the country clubs, those temples of exclusion, become stages for a grotesque parody of equality: everyone bleeds the same colour under the chandeliers. But do not mistake this for a moral awakening. It is merely the final act of a farce that began with a cult of personality and ended with a laughing stock of a state.
The International community wrings its hands while the corpse of a nation rots in plain sight. For those who study historical cycles, this is textbook: a civilisation that cannot produce basic penicillin will inevitably find its golf courses converted into trauma wards. The only question is whether the West will learn from this, or simply wait for its own country clubs to be repossessed.
